A robot has learned a handful of simple words in the same general way that infants do: by listening to the speech, and feedback, of human adults.

Human teachers—who ran the gamut in terms of age, occupation, and experience with kids—worked with a humanoid, toddler-sized robot, describing the colors and shapes on a toy block, as seen in the video above and described in a new study in PLoS ONE. The robot babbled back, learning which combinations of sounds are correct based both on what it had heard and on how the human responded, much like babies do when learning to speak. Giving the robot a childlike form, the researchers suggest, let people interact with it more like they would an actual baby, helping it better model language learning than having people talk to a screen or a box.

It’s pretty cool that the robots could pick up words from human-like interactions. But it’s important to keep in mind that we can only build robots to imitate what it looks like when babies learn, because we don’t know exactly what’s going on in babies’ brains when they learn language—and we certainly don’t understand it well enough to build a program that would work just the same way.

According to the Turing test, or the diverse ways organisms solves the same problems, it doesn’t matter. This is learning language symbols and concepts.

Pippa

I wouldn’t go so far as to say the robot was learning language, symbols and concepts – language maybe, but even that may be an extrapolation of what we saw on the video. Words, yes! Not to diminish the import of what was done – an inspiring first (baby) step.